Qimonda first began sampling 512Mb GDDR5 memory chips in November 2007 and now, six months after, the memory manufacturer claims to have the parts ready to roll. “Qimonda was the first to announce samples of GDDR5 back in November 2007. We have proven the technology and we can deliver in volume production to the market today,” said Glen Haley, communications director of Qimonda in North America, in an interview with X-bit labs web-site. Currently Qimonda has GDDR5 parts that will run at 3.60GHz, 4.0GHz and 4.50GHz clock-speeds and use PG-TFBGA-170 packages. They will boast the maximum available data transfer rate up to 20GB/s, as compared to 16GB/s for the previous GDDR4 generation. GDDR5 chips are also projected to play a substantial role in the next round of war between leading graphics manufacturers. Reports claim that the latest AMD/ATI 4-series Radeon video cards will make use of GDDR5. Hynix Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics are also expected to make available their own GDDR5 memory chips soon.

4.5 GHz Ram? Somebody inform me about this, but your CPU wouldn't start being a bottleneck at those speeds, would it?

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That's graphics DRAM. So all that bandwidth exists between the GPU and these banks. CPU won't bottleneck. Only bottleneck would be storage, on how quickly your hard-drive(s) can send out data that the GPU could write onto these banks....what goes on when your game is loading a level or something.

I can't wait to see how much of a boost it will give to new video cards coming out. The memory bandwith on the vram will increase alot and we can expect to see a big difference in performance. I would like to see how Nvidia will respond to this because they still use GDDR3. Ati will probably be the first to use GDDR5 and you can expect Nvidia to switch over. I'm also curious to see how high the frequency will go on the new GDDR5,and how much oc you will be able to get out of GDDR5. If Ati does switch over to GDDR5 first, than it could Nvidia. ATI FTW!!! Though I have Intel and Nvidia right now LOL!!!